


riptide

by pageleaf



Category: The Queen's Thief - Megan Whalen Turner
Genre: Angst, F/M, Melodrama, Multi, Pining, Unrequited Love, poor costis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-11
Updated: 2015-05-11
Packaged: 2018-03-30 00:46:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,727
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3916930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pageleaf/pseuds/pageleaf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If they told him to march in opposite directions, he doesn’t know which one he would follow. Some days, his head tells him, <i>There is your queen, and there is her cowherd kidnapper</i>, but his heart tells him, <i>There is your king, and there is the woman who still gives him nightmares</i>. He hates each of them, for the other’s sake. He thinks the person he hates the most is himself. He thinks he’s losing his mind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	riptide

**Author's Note:**

> As always, enormous thank you to grim_lupine and plalligator for beta-ing this for me so quickly and so well <333
> 
> I imagine this takes place a few years after the events of _The King of Attolia_ , which would give Costis more time to fall in deep and melodramatic love with his king and queen.

If they told him to march in opposite directions, he doesn’t know which one he would follow. Some days, his head tells him, _There is your queen, and there is her cowherd kidnapper_ , but his heart tells him, _There is your king, and there is the woman who still gives him nightmares_. He hates each of them, for the other’s sake. He thinks the person he hates the most is himself. He thinks he’s losing his mind.

It’s a good thing they’re in love. Anyone with eyes can see it, but half the world is blind. Or maybe it’s just that half the world hasn’t seen the Thief leaning up to kiss Attolia, hasn’t seen his king scream and his queen faint, for each other. Maybe half the world is blind, or maybe Costis is going mad.

Costis is going mad, is—already mad? He would have to be mad, for loving like this. This isn’t love, this is fire, this is flame. This is alcohol, coursing through his veins, but never drowning out his king and queen’s faces in his mind.

This is flame, this is rain, setting him on fire and putting him out, burning him until he’s dying and then rescuing him, so he can stay in pain, in agony forever. This is not a soothing rain, but a rain like tears. It feels like salt in his wounds.

Costis is going mad, is already mad, because he dreads and looks forward to each day in equal measure. He wishes he were the king, so he could twist the pins out of the queen’s hair, see her curls tumble around her shoulders, smell their fragrance as he leaned down to ki—

He wishes he were the queen, so he could see the king waking up in the morning.

(But he doesn’t want to be the queen’s thief, or the thief’s queen. He wants to be theirs. He wants to be _their guard_.)

It’s a good thing they’re in love, because perhaps then they’ll never order him to march in different directions. As it is, his heart rends itself further in two every second, trying to decide who it loves more, the foolish thing. (What a foolish heart. What a foolish guard.)

Sometimes he watches the queen from behind the king’s shoulder at the breakfast table. He wonders what it would be like to leave with her, instead of the king. He knows she doesn’t go to court immediately, but retires to her rooms for a few hours. What if she took Costis with her? What if she took him into her rooms, into her bed, into her arms, took him—no more of that.

It’s a good thing they’ll never order him against each other, because he would tear himself apart, try to split himself down the middle, and then neither of them would have a guard. They’d just have a man, bleeding out on the throne room floor, dead for love of them both (but maybe, they’d think, it was lack of love. He obviously didn’t love either of them enough to decide.)

Sometimes, Costis wonders what the skin on his king’s wrists feels like. It looks soft, softer than silk. Delicate. Even his scarred stump looks delicate. Costis wonders if he could feel the bones of those bird-like wrists if he took them in his own big, clumsy hands. He would be gentle. He wonders what the skin would feel like under his fingertips. They say the thinnest skin is on the lips. If the king’s wrists have such thin skin, maybe kissing them would be just like—no more of that, either.

This isn’t love, this is flame and rain and _agony_ , an alcohol that burns and never numbs, a hunger that thrums under his skin and is never satisfied, a thirst that dries out his heart into a husk, until he feels like if he breathes too deeply it’ll shrivel up and wither away beneath his ribs, into dust.

It’s a good thing they love each other. It’s a good thing they have each other, because he’d never want either of them to feel like this, no, never like this. He sees the king look at his queen (whose queen? not Costis’s) sometimes, like he’s remembering what it was like to love her when she despised him, and he looks so lost, so young for a moment, and Costis _burns_.

And then the queen looks at her king and touches his wrist so carefully, the thin skin that borders his leather cuff, the same skin Costis has stared at so tenderly so many times, as tenderly as the queen touches it now, and Costis burns.

He burns. This isn’t love, this is fire and flame, this is hell. If they told him to march into hell, he’d laugh, because isn’t he already there?

He thinks, sometimes, when he and his king (whose king?) are alone in the king’s chambers, of dropping to his knees in front of that chair by the window. He thinks of kneeling and laying his cheek on his king’s knee, and exhaling out all his roaring, raging waves of thought into the space between Eugenides’s thighs.

He thinks of Eugenides, sometimes, not the king, not the thief, not the cowherd who kidnapped the queen, not Attolis, but Eugenides. A god’s name, and sometimes he feels like a god to Costis. Deadly and unreachable and beautiful enough to make a man cry, but worth it, so worth it. Why lay ten gold cups on another god’s altar, when he could just worship at the altar of the king’s scarred, boyish face for the rest of his life, and be happy?

Or, not happy. A semblance of happy. Content?

Or not even that, because there would always, always be something missing, and that something was a hurricane of a woman, just as deadly and unreachable and beautiful, a woman who doesn’t need a god’s name to be the deity for soldier after soldier.

Costis could kneel at their feet forever, and be scorched by his love, could watch them touch each other with love, and smile at each other, and kiss each other—and being witness to that might be enough to sate the hunger gnawing at his insides. And if he knelt long enough, maybe they would remember him. Maybe they would look at him, looking at them, and they would see him. Maybe, maybe. Maybe they would lock their doors, after that. No more kissing on stairways, no more fainting in his arms, no more drunken dancing on rooftops, no more anything.

It would be death, or worse than death.

Better to kneel quietly, then, and not be noticed.

It’s a good thing they love each other, and love each other so wholeheartedly, for if they had room in their hearts, their eyes might wander, and they might see the guard that tracks their every moment, shadows their every step, devours their every action. They might see him, and say _enough_. Or one of them, maybe even both of them, might take pity on him, and let him kneel at their feet a little longer, let him touch them in a pale imitation of how they touch each other. At best, he could have a taste of wine touch his parched husk of a heart, and be happy. Or a semblance of happy. Content.

Oh, but he would want more. He would always want more. He could never be content; what a joke. A joke of a guard. Anyone would laugh at the story of Costis, the guard who fell in love with his king and queen, an at best tragic footnote in the epic of Eugenides and Irene. He would always want more, he would _beg_ for more, and they would eventually grow tired of him. Their pity would run dry.

No, better to kneel quietly, and not be noticed.

It’s a good thing they love each other, so blind to everyone around them, or they might see the man burning at their feet. Costis couldn’t have that. If they told him to march in opposite directions, they would definitely notice. They wouldn’t be able to ignore the man in front of them tearing himself apart. So it’s a good thing they wouldn’t do that.

It’s a good thing they love each other.

Maybe if he tells himself that often enough, it’ll soften the blow of the dull axe hammering away at his chest, or at least sharpen it enough to finish him off for good. Because oh, he doesn’t think he can take this anymore. It’s a good thing they love each other, and love each other enough to keep matching pistols under their pillows, always protecting each other, guarding each other. It’s a good thing they probably don’t need him anymore, because he’s no longer the only one who loves them. The whole country would march into hell for them, so Costis isn’t alone.

He could be a soldier, again, or a Lieutenant on the border. He could go to war. Maybe, if he got injured, he could go home. He could hug his sister, and she’d let him pretend to be fine. He could hug his father, who would brush the hair back from his forehead, and he could stop pretending.

(But who is he kidding? This isn’t love, it’s a drug. It burns him from the inside out and drains him of his very life force, but it drags him back in for more every time. This isn’t love, this is a riptide.)

It’s a good thing they love each other, because he would never want them to feel like this. Which means that they have to stay alive, and stay safe, for each other. Which means they need a guard.

Which means he has to (gets to?) stay.

He can kneel a little longer at his king and queen’s feet (whose king? whose queen? not his), and be happy. Or a semblance of happy. Content.

He can survive.

For them.

(This isn’t love, this is a sacrifice. This is him cutting out his own heart and laying it at the altar of their love. This is him hoping for a favor from his gods, the only gods who matter now, but fearing their attention.)

He can survive anything, for them.


End file.
